Attorney Andrew Strong has a take-notice résumé, accomplished and enviable. But it includes a bit of a detour from the traditional corporate route.

Over 15 years he built a successful legal career while rising to partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, a New York law firm with an office in Houston. Then in 2009 he abruptly switched courses, joining the Texas A&M University System as general counsel. There, he took on the unusual role of helping to create and run a state-of-the-art biotech company tasked with developing vaccines.

That company, Kalon Biotherapeutics, was sold in December to Diosynth Biotechnologies, the U.S. subsidiary of the Japanese corporate giant FujiFilm, for an undisclosed sum.

Now Strong, 48, has rejoined his old firm, this time to launch what he describes as a first-of-its-kind full-service legal division dedicated to helping biotech startups. He says Pillsbury is poised to be the legal leader in Texas' booming biotech industry.

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Previous position: General counsel at Texas A&M System, where he received a civil engineering degree in 1989.

Law school: South Texas College of Law, 1994.

Personal: Married with two children.

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One week in, he is clearly enthusiastic and maybe even a little nervous. He wouldn't have it any other way.

Following are edited excerpts from a recent interview with the Chronicle.

Q: Why go back to a corporate firm?

A: I love the idea of creating something that does not exist. My moves have never been about money. They have been about opportunity. It struck me when I was walking through M.D. Anderson, and their executive offices were not off somewhere in an ivory tower. They are in the hospital. So every day, executives at M.D. Anderson walk by cancer patients. It reminds me of why we are here. We are here to leave a lasting impact.

Q: Why biotech?

A: I saw the light of what I call the Texas biotech explosion. There are so many companies that are new startup, midsize biotech companies that are anchoring themselves in Texas because of all that is going on here. We are going to see over the next 10 years, I believe, the equivalent of the growth you saw in Boston, 10, 15 years ago, San Diego, the Bay Area.

Q: How much of the firm is going to be dedicated to this?

A: The partners in the West Coast and East Coast in the life sciences practice are fully committed to what we're doing here and supporting me. Obviously I'm not going to be doing it alone. Of the 600 lawyers in the firm, we have about 60 dedicated to life sciences. That could easily double in the next five years.

Q: How many clients do you hope to attract?

A: Over 100 in a year to two years.

Q: Aren't other law firms in Houston doing this?

A: Being on the business side for several years, I understand it like no one else.

Q: Take us back to your time at Texas A&M. What was it that lured you?

A: What really intrigued me was about what Texas A&M was doing at the time. This was in 2009, there was a lot of movement toward helping fill this gap in the development of new vaccines and therapeutics. We have institutions that do drug discovery, but there is no true, at that time, synergies to where drugs can be developed. They can be taken off the bench, put into development so they could be put into a clinical trial and ultimately into the commercial market. If we could build this infrastructure, not just do what everyone else is doing, but do ita way that is so off the charts that people have to take a look and say, "What are you doing down there?" That just captivated me.

Q: So that was the idea behind the facility?

A: There was a new facility that they were building that was a next-generation bio-manufacturing facility. So this was a facility that can take the drugs that are invented at M.D. Anderson or wherever, scale them up, and make sufficient quantities of those drugs so it can get into a clinic and ultimately can be commercialized. You have some of the most incredible discoveries that happen on the bench, but if you try to extrapolate it to the needs of the population, it's a million dollars a person. You could cure cancer, but no one can afford it.

Q: You have said in the past many of these companies fail. Why?

A: Sometimes a scientist will start up a company and that person may be an amazing scientist, a rock star. But if they don't set up the company properly - if they don't run the company properly, just on the business side, on the legal side, that company's not properly situated to bring in investors or the IP wasn't done properly - you can lose it all.

Q: How often does that happen?

A: The failure rate is very high for any small company, but it is much harder in biotech.

Q: Do you ever secretly want to trade your suit for a lab coat?

A: The two most meaningful days in my three-year career at Kalon was when I drove up at 4 a.m. Sunday morning and spent time on the manufacturing floor making influenza vaccine. I loved it. I thought, I should do more of this.

Jenny Deam came to the Houston Chronicle in March 2015 from Denver, trading thin air for thick. She writes about the business of health care and has been nationally recognized for her coverage of how insurance practices and the shifting health care landscape affect the people of Texas. Prior to joining the Chronicle she was a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Times based in Denver where she wrote about school shootings, the Aurora movie massacre and its aftermath, and the early days of Colorado’s legalization of marijuana. She has been a reporter for the Denver Post, the Tampa Bay Times and the Kansas City Star. She has written for a wide range of regional and national magazines, including an award-winning investigation into how health insurers charge women more than men for the same coverage or deny them altogether, and a profile of the reluctant journey of a Virginia Tech survivor to become a national voice for gun law reform. She is a graduate of Washburn University